The School of Life infuriates me for many reasons, but I will restrain myself and talk just about this specific post.
Perhaps the small libraries of historic figures has more to do with the availability of books than it does their minimalism. I agree that people should not be reading every new self-help or business book that gets published. The majority of new books are bad. History acts as a great filter, which is why focussing on old books is a strong heuristic to find good books. I also agree with Nassim Taleb, who says that you should try to read the works from people who have actually done something (opposed to modern pseudo-philosophers like Alain de Botton, who is just trying to capitalise on the religion-shaped hole in western morality). I am not a religion apologist, but his videos and lectures are structured exactly the same way as sermons. He even feigns a false pastor modesty. Ugh I am beginning to rant now.
As a civilisation I still believe that we are not reading enough. I can feel my reading habit eroded and tugged by modern media. I feel fulfilled after reading in a way that YouTube or Netflix cannot provide.
> I am not a religion apologists, but his videos and lectures are structured exactly the same way as sermons. He even feigns a false pastor modesty
I highly recommend Jacques Ellul's "Les nouveaux possédés." (translated in English as "The New Demons" [1]) an analysis written back in 1973 describing this exact process you're describing, i.e. modern stuff (rock stars among others) trying to fill the hole of the disappearing religion. Ever since I've read the book I cannot attend a big music concert or a crowded football match without thinking about it (before this pandemic started, of course).
I was raised in a highly devout religious environment. I was a true believer myself.
One of the more remarkable experiences of my early adult life was attending a sales conference. I couldn't believe how much that business event felt like a _religious_ event to me. The format, the language, the emotions... I recognized all of these.
I'm no longer religious in the same way, but those experiences have made me particularly sensitive the power of faith and community. Once you know what you're looking for, you start to see it everywhere: in businesses, in politics, in fandom. People want belonging and a sense of being part of something greater than themselves. Belief in the supernatural is not required to engender that feeling.
My background is pentecostal/evangelical, and I was also a true believer well into my twenties. I mostly left on good terms with God; not being able to believe in his existence just made it difficult to be in a relationship.
The expertise in 'marketing' in this environment was incredible, and I've been both surprised and somewhat relieved to find that for the most part nobody 'outside the fold' seems to properly study how it works and apply it to stuff like selling their startup, especially startups that rely on some degree of community... Some do, but it's surprisingly rare to me.
For a brief time I got involved with the School of Life / Church for Atheists stuff in a desire to find some of what I've lost since leaving church, and I was astounded to find that they seemed to mostly try to emulate all the worst parts of what made 'church life' work.
For examples, the Evangelicals/Pentecostals figured out that rock concert-style Sunday services work to get people interested, but the attrition rate is terrible. Instead, to get people to stay and become part of the church, emphasizing the 'small groups' (~12 people meeting weekly) is by far the most effective strategy. Make people spend time in a small subcommunity and eat together, and you got a member!
So what does School of Life do with their 'Sunday Assemblies'? Awkwardly emulate church but neglect the 'small group' aspect, and hoping that somehow this is more successful than, say, the rapidly-dying Catholic/Protestant churches that mostly rely on boring Sunday services.
> People want belonging and a sense of being part of something greater than themselves. Belief in the supernatural is not required to engender that feeling.
I agree, but feel like this is a not a bad thing most of the time (even though it can be), and I say this as an atheist in the traditional sense, with iconoclastic tendencies when provoked...
The problem, is the same faults of religious movements happen with these religions-without-the-supernatural, but as an atheist you don't have the same supernatural to mock as a defense.
You see faith based reasoning and very strong emotional reactions to things that are not real.
That’s interesting, I’ll check it out. I often tell folks that without concerts I am going on without my religion. And the best concerts are those where the most attendees most actively participate. This human need for group belonging will be fulfilled one way or another. Concerts, sports, protests, war - go on down the line (granted I think churches fit in further towards the end ...). There is a psychological cost to shutting these events down that must also be considered.
I can’t help but take this chance to recommend Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium. It’s an absolute masterpiece of a novel set in Byzantium just after the Nika Riots; the chariot races and Blue/Green dynamic play a big role in the plot.
> Except that the universal adoption of sports would result in a net positive. The same cannot be said for pornography.
By adoption of sports, do you mean universal participation or spectation?
The former I suppose would be a net positive, if you limit the requirement to just making sure everyone does at least some physical activity every day, but if you mean that everyone should be required to play some sport as a significant pastime the negatives start reducing the net positive.
If the latter, I must vehemently disagree. We would probably be better off banning spectator sports entirely rather than making everyone watch.
Thanks for that, very interesting topic. But surely large sporting events have existed alongside large religion for some thousands of years (Roman events are the obvious example). Perhaps both trying to get at the same thing but not being that thing themselves.
This is a cheap shot at Ellul, as he has been proved more right than wrong even though he was writing about technology and our technological society since the 1960s-1970s (a very difficult thing to achieve, being right on technology, that is). As such, I personally think that he has “done” a lot more compared to other people, witness how even FB multi-millionaires have started following him and his ideas (knowingly or unknowingly).
Ellul, I would like to think, is someone who came back from the Abyss without losing himself.
Preserving once sanity while reading him is difficult enough, imagine what you would have to go through while you think through these things for years.
Odd comment, given that aside from writing a few ephemeral books and engaging in a ton of pontificating, the only thing Taleb has ever done in his life is move money around on computers for the sole purpose of enriching himself, while Ellul was active in the French Resistance and was honored for his actions to save Jews from the Nazis.
I guess it depends on what one means by "doing something."
“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”
We're supposed to be civil here but frankly the linked post is twaddle. You can't give the reason for not having unaffordable personal libraries and then disregard it immediately because you're selling your theses, whatever those might be.
The thing is books used to be very expensive, yet people managed to read as many as they could get their hands on and even spend crazy money on them. Open any book from say the 17th century and you'll see how they quote as many works as they could. Take the Quixote for instance, there's a famous chapter about the library of Don Quixote, the whole novel is built around satirizing a popular genre that Cervantes as an avid reader also knew well.
> Perhaps the small libraries of historic figures has more to do with the availability of books than it does their minimalism.
The article also appears to be conflating the number of books owned (or more precisely, being depicted as owning) with the number of books read, which is supremely, jaw-droppingly dumb:
> We can pick up the minimalist attitude to reading in early visual depictions of one of the heroes of Christian scholarship, St Jerome – who was by all accounts the supreme intellect of Christendom, who translated the Greek and Hebrew portions of the Bible into Latin, wrote a large number of commentaries on scripture and is now the patron saint of libraries and librarians. But despite all his scholarly efforts, when it came to showing where and how St Jerome worked, a detail stands out: there are almost no books in his famous study. Strikingly, the most intelligent and thoughtful intellectual of the early church seems to have read fewer things than an average modern eight year old. To follow the depiction by Antonello da Messina, St Jerome appears to be the proud owner of about ten books in all!
How am I supposed to read this but as a claim that Jerome wrote more books than he read, based on a painting made a millennium after his death?
> I also agree with Nassim Taleb, who says that you should try to read the works from people who have actually done something (opposed to modern pseudo-philosophers like Alain de Botton, who is just trying to capitalise on the religion-shaped hole in western morality).
And is reading and writing books not 'doing something'? I don't know exactly what Taleb means by it, but it smacks of plain elitism.
I suppose more concretely "doing something related to what you are writing about". On principle I have nothing against pure philosophers, who integrate old theories and formulate new ones. However, in my experience, writings like that of Marcus Aurelius are more compelling, who was a success in his own right before ever writing anything. Most modern "business" authors don't have any business (other than selling books to people). Taleb is just warning people to not take advise from authors who don't actually have "skin in the game".
De Botton does not write about things he cannot know about. He has not proposed a Grand Unified Theory of Physics or a mechanism for how matter becomes conscious. He writes about things everyone can relate to, which means he can relate to them as well -- but the work seems to be in thinking about things in non-obvious and novel ways and in the actual writing process. The quality of de Botton's writing really speaks for itself.
It must be difficult work in itself because even Taleb, when he took a stab at this 'pseudo-philosophy' genre with his book The Bed of Procrustes, managed to produce absolute piffle which would never have been published if Taleb weren't already famous for his popular finance books.
There seems to be an underlying presumption that writing is not real work and so people should be successful in the real world before they should feel entitled to write anything.
Couldn't agree more. There's something to be said for life experience which filters out the irrelevant and the non-important. I've always appreciated the story about the pit trader that earned millions in his career trading green lumber, all while assuming it's just lumber that's been painted green. It's too easy to theorize in an ivory tower and miss what's actually important.
It's elitism and it's a bad heuristic. There are lots of situations where someone might know a lot about X yet for some reason never did X. Being able to do X, and being able to usefully explain X are two different skills and few people can do both.
Whatever its faults, most of the works in Bloom's list at the end of The Western Canon are probably very much worthwhile, yet appreciating them could occupy more than a lifetime for anyone whose job is not reading literature, even if other pastimes be largely avoided.
And it's mostly limited to fiction, drama, and poetry! It omits almost all math, science (including social science and history), and philosophy that's not of literary significance. Even within those restrictions, it's by no means a comprehensive list of every worthwhile work or author ever (if nothing else, the "Western" qualifier makes that plain).
We're even there for film, and we've only meaningfully had that medium for ~130 years. One may watch thousands of movies without ever leaving the realm of "widely regarded as excellent, meaningful, and/or important". I'd imagine there's far more than enough very, very good recorded music that it's in the same situation. Many lifetimes of top-notch media exist. Reading/hearing/watching anything that's not very good is entirely a choice.
>Reading/hearing/watching anything that's not very good is entirely a choice.
Stimulating, contemporary, convenient. Pick two. It is as much of a choice as home made food over fast food is a choice. But it is not always convenient.
Personally I just cut out the contemporary stuff and there is an abundance of good material. When I find something modern and stimulating, it usually involved a certain amount of luck, a lot of trial and error, or just perseverance scouring wikipedia, magazines, blogs, whatever. Most people don't choose what they're into, it is dictated to them by producers. And there is a widespread fear of b&w / classic definition films, stringed classical instruments and literature.
I think there is some stimulating, contemporary stuff. But I agree it can be difficult to find conveniently. I mostly follow a lot of you-tubers and subreddits that follow this stuff and then use them as a filter for it. But even then it's like something good once a month or two. Though I prefer the contemporary stuff for some reason and can't really give it up, so I am willing to put in that effort.
I feel like focusing on whether we read too little or too much is missing the point. There are things to be gained from a meticulous read and deep discussion of Pride and Prejudice via a book club, but there are also things to be gained from watching shallow educational channels on Youtube. Likewise, there are things to be lost from spending all your time reading every classic just as there are things to be lost from binging Youtube. It's not black and white, but it is a zero-sum game.
IMHO, what matters more is what you're hoping to get out of deep reading and/or shallow infotainment. Maybe reading the Odyssey leads you into lateral shallow entertainment regarding different mythological figures. Maybe a Vsauce video leads you down into deep reading about game theory. Who gets to say which of these activities is "wasted" time?
> The School of Life infuriates me for many reasons
"Alain de Botton [owner of The School of Life], for example, has built an international self-help empire, offering lessons in self-love to CEOs and yummy-mummies (and daddies). But what actually drives him, underneath the bonnet? What dirty fuel keeps him motoring? It's the fact he had a violent tyrannical father [1] who never accepted little Alain or made him feel good enough. All his books, he has said, were an attempt to connect with Pater Horribilis. The School of Life should offer a workshop in Radical Self-Loathing."
I think this article is perhaps meant for you. Just to show there is more than one way to think about something. Different perspectives can help you refine your thoughts and help with forming a more refined view on a topic, even if you disagree. In my view reading is just a hobby like netflix or youtube, not something I do because it has any value.
Hah. I appreciate the School of Life rant. Something about it bugged me, but I never bothered to articulate it or think very hard about it. I think 'pseudo-philosopher trying to capitalize on the religion-shaped hole in western morality' get pretty close to it.
I think this might be what is meant by religious people when they say that nothing is "sacred" anymore. Meaning that there is no longer any value or virtue high enough to not be questioned, even if these are the axioms of the society.
Well, those religious prejudices and injustices aren't sacred anymore, but if you have a public reputation to loose, or don't want to get burned as a company, you should avoid being associated with stuff like gender- or racial-inequality.
(as long as you aren't targeting the Q-Anon or KKK crowd)
So it seems the definition of sacred is simply changing. (luckily)
At the time around '69 it maybe was like nothing was sacred anymore, and everything was being questioned, but i don't think you can apply this anymore.
People later settled on some moral progressions, which are now
being defended.
I think we might be talking about different things here. Up until very recently it was against the code of most publishers to broadcast things like murders, offensive language, acts of violence and gore. Some might say that the societies of the past were overly prudish, but I believe that this development is predominantly negative. For a modern Netflix series to take off, it is basically mandatory to have full-frontal nudity in the first season. Nothing is shocking anymore, which is what I meant by "sacred".
Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV. In that way, popular culture is like a barometer for morality of a population.
I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.
> For a modern Netflix series to take off, it is basically mandatory to have full-frontal nudity in the first season.
I can't really see why this is bad, which is kind of what we're talking about. I can see why full-frontal nudity is a tactical error in some contexts, in that you shouldn't do it because you'll end up in a worse position if you do, but I really don't get the apparent moral revulsion some people have regarding the naked human form.
This is part of what we're talking about because it signals that the traditionalists can't impose their revulsion on the rest of us. The recent successes of the Queer Rights movement also prove this: Same-sex marriage has gone from unthinkable to unremarkable. So has transitioning. The people who are most opposed to those things were utterly incapable of making cogent arguments sufficient to sway the societies in which they lived, so now they're widely accepted.
> Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV.
No. Most people don't want to see that. Most people have a serious aversion to seeing real death and gore and so on, and it isn't feigned "virtue signalling" or similar.
> I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.
Except the arguments against, say, nudity on TV come down to "I don't like it, so it's immoral" and that exact same argument has been used to argue against social equality of all kinds.
I don't think is is true at all. In anything, the past was much more into reporting sensationalist news about murder than now. The infamous UK "News of the World" tabloid, which existed to give titillating reports of murder and rapes, started publishing in 1843. It closed in 2011 in the wake of the phone hacking scandal because society began to care about victim's rights. The idea that the past was more moral than the present is just rose-tinted nostalgia without support.
> For a modern Netflix series to take off, it is basically mandatory to have full-frontal nudity in the first season.
Really? As much as nudity in television content has grown, I think showing genitals is still pretty much not done. For example, Narcos didn't do it, as far as I watched it.
This is only true if you define the "Religion" out of religion; that is, shear it of any dogma or faith claims or even the "funny hats social club" cultural aspect, and then say that all of the remaining guidance is the religion. This isn't what religion means to most people, regardless of whether they have one or not.
On my analysis, I'm shearing what I believe you mean by "faith claims" from the term "religion". But I'm definitely leaving in dogma and the funny hats social club cultural aspect.
For example, look at the scandal from some years back in which some European (Spanish?) meat products were found to include horse meat. Everyone agreed that (1) there was no risk of any kind involved in eating the "contaminated" products; (2) you could not taste the difference; (3) a recall was in order; (4) this was and deserved to be a HUGE scandal.
I'm saying that the modern Western prohibition on eating horse is a religious phenomenon, regardless of whether people are comfortable calling it one. If you are using a definition of "religion" that doesn't include things like this, your terms do not carve reality at the joints.
> I'm saying that the modern Western prohibition on eating horse is a religious phenomenon, regardless of whether people are comfortable calling it one.
And this is contrary to what people understand as religion, which seems to avoid carving reality at the joints: All of a sudden you can dispute the notion that people can be irreligious by pointing to some social conventions they follow, and demanding that those conventions are religion. That does not seem very respectful to personal self-identity.
> And this is contrary to what people understand as religion, which seems to avoid carving reality at the joints
It's not. It matches exactly what people understand as religion in any context that doesn't involve themselves.
Compare the Roman Emperor, who was never referred to as a "king" -- by the Romans -- because the concept was taboo. The Greeks went ahead and referred to him as a king. Who was right? What would we gain by excluding imperial Rome from a study of monarchical societies?
I simply don't recognize the article's analysis of why we read. I read (voraciously) during my 'downtime': in bed before sleeping, sitting on the toilet, during lunchbreaks. Often the times that a lot of people are game-playing/watching youtube/scrolling FB. I'm not aspiring to "know everything" or to appear to be an "intelligent person". I think reading a lot is just a habit.
It may be that I'd be better off reading less, and having more of my own thoughts. But I find it enjoyable, and after I've read a book I generally feel like it was a net gain, and not a time-suck (like the aimless surfing I can sometimes be diverted into). In any case I certainly don't identify with any need to read a few carefully curated books to "be shaped – deeply shaped in [my] capacity to live and die well".
I read history, popular nature books, novels, classics, travel - so there's no pattern or attempt to 'better' myself. It's just fun and passes the time better than sitting on the john and scrolling a meaningless feed.
I'm not a big fan of this article, but I don't think it's advocating reading less. Rather, it advocates rereading a few core works more. There's something to be said for knowing a few things well instead of trying to know everything, but I also think getting exposed to new ideas is important.
I think my main disagreement with the entire tenor of the article, is that it treats reading as just one more aspect of the modern obsession of 'self-improvement', whereas I read because it's fun.
This doesn't mean that I never re-read a book - last year I re-read War & Peace, for instance. But I didn't do it to somehow deepen my knowledge of a 'core work' I read it again primarily because it's an immensely enjoyable narrative.
I also read a book about Ants purely for the fun of it. Now I can barely remember anything other than a couple of details about soldier ants that are also suicide bombers (when defeat appears inevitable, they tighten a muscle in their abdomen that causes their thorax to burst, and spray all the attackers around them with acid) and that a whole nest of the smallest known ants would fit inside a single head of the largest known species.
These two facts that I recall now can hardly count as 'deeper knowledge' or anything pretentious like that. But reading the book gave me a much greater appreciation of natural phenomena around me, and now when I see an ant's nest in the forest, I know more about what happens inside, I can discuss it with my kids and I'm more engaged and aware of my environment. But that's not why I read the book.
I totally agree. I like rereading Terry Pratchett books because I enjoy them. I reread philosophy books because I want to remember the arguments and get a new perspective on the work based on new experience. I read books about physics, biology, history, psychology and other subjects to expose myself to new ideas and try to expand my thinking. I think there's a ideal mean here that rereads some and reads new books some.
Not only could can you appreciate the natural phenomena more, but you just shared that appreciation with tens (hundreds? thousands? no idea what the scale of comment viewings is for HN) of other people who can now appreciate the fact and share it with their own children and others around them.
I would suggest that what you say is an excellent illustration of something implied by the OP: we're not reading the way that our learned ancestors did, we're processing words. Books mean everything to me, but I can't really quote much if at all from the most recent or even cherished ones. I drive my wife crazy as I add bookshelves to our living room, arguing that I need to have physical books to refer to or I'll forget what I have read entirely. She reads as many books as I do but gets them from the library. But how often do I pick up Herodotus or Knausgaard from the shelf? Not often.
The thoughts you have are shaped by the stimulus from your environment. Reading more and better books is a way to have more and better thoughts; it's not a zero sum game.
Please forgive me the pretentiousness of what I'm about to share, but this is so great:
"You complain that in your part of the world there is a scant supply of books. But it is quality, rather than quantity, that matters; a limited list of reading benefits; a varied assortment serves only for delight. He who would arrive at the appointed end must follow a single road and not wander through many ways. What you suggest is not travelling; it is mere tramping." - Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, #45
This is such a powerful idea to me, from about 2000 years ago, that reading everything is like drifting aimlessly never arriving anywhere; it's just so recognizable.
Voltaire's perspective[1] struck me as more compelling:
> To-day people complain of a surfeit: but it is not for readers to complain; the remedy is easy; nothing forces them to read. It is not any the more for authors to complain. Those who make the crowd must not cry that they are being crushed. Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! and if one read profitably, one would see the deplorable follies to which the common people offer themselves as prey every day.
The minimalist attitude to reading in medicine was a disaster. For centuries "doctors" only studied the classic texts (inaccuracies and all) and reading widely or seeking new medical knowledge was discouraged or made illegal. Medicine was correspondingly stagnant. The history of mankind isn't a straight line of progress, but if you're pointing to the past to show why we should be doing things differently today, you better make a way more convincing case than the one presented here about why that aspect of the past was better. At least try to argue the scholarship of the days past was better than the scholarship of today (not an easy argument to make). Otherwise, its just like an argument for a paleo diet - why would I want to adopt a diet for health reasons based on an idea that said diet was consumed by people that lived short, brutal lives?
What total nonsense. Of course medieval scholars had fewer books; books were much more expensive. Gutenberg hadn't come along yet (or, when Jerome was around, had just barely come along). Perhaps if the author of this post had read some history or economics they wouldn't have wasted the time of the people who had read that blog post.
> Similarly, in the Ancient Greek world, one was meant to focus in on a close knowledge of just two books: Homer’s Odyssey and his Iliad
Can anybody on HN verify if this is true? I thought the Iliad and Odyssey were only two of Homer's works, the rest of them lost. Why would the Ancient Greek focus on those two and not any of Homer's not-yet-lost works? Did the Ancient Greek person really read these as fervently as a modern religious person reads their holy book? I know classicists debate these things all the time, but it seems like the author is just riffing "shout out to people who know these classics." I'll gladly be corrected on this point, but when I read this I began to suspect the author has no idea what they're talking about.
> Did the Ancient Greek person really read these as fervently as a modern religious person reads their holy book?
I doubt they viewed Homer like religious people view their sacred texts. However, Ancient Greek writers do quote and discuss Homer extensively. For example, Herodotus and Thucydides reference (and speculate) about Homer. Plato's dialogues refer to Homer a lot. Seneca, several hundred years later, is still quoting Homer with the assumption that his audience will know the poems quite well.
No. Aristotle, Herodotus, Plato, Sappho, etc. were considered important reading in their time, among others. Copying manuscripts was an extremely costly endeavor, so things that had many surviving copies could be inferred as having been regarded as important, even if we did not have any other indicators.
Afaik, they did not even read them. They were poems to be memorized and remembered. So one person would learn it and recite it to others. That is why it is a poem and that is why it contains repetitive parts - so that it remembers easily.
Also, Homer likely was not one person. The origin of the poem is not entirely clear, but speculations are that the poem is result of oral tradition written down at some point.
A book is a somewhat large time investment. Often it is worth it but often it isn't. The main problem is the sheer amount of books out there. Deciding what to read next is a non-trivial decision problem. Currently I'm basing my decisions on ratings, recommendations from friends and book clubs.
It would be nice if sites like Goodreads kept statistics on ratings for second/third/... reading (maybe they do?). Such information could help readers identify books that are exceptional regarding second/third/... reading.
> A book is a somewhat large time investment. Often it is worth it but often it isn't.
But everyone has time for reddit/hn/facebook. Sometimes for hours at a day. :}
I posit that the real problem is that books (especially fiction novels) are engaging but not hypnotic. It's easy to scroll HN because it's literally hypnotic and thus no thinking required. That's why they're called newsFEEDs. You're being spoon-fed news. But books demand that you think, and you can't ignore previous plot developments without becoming disoriented.
If you want to read more books, the first three steps are to:
1. Admit you have a problem. The problem is NOT that you have a hard time reading but that you're hypnotized for hours a day.
2. Realize that total abstinence is the solution. If you had the willpower to restrict yourself to 30min a day, you wouldn't be here. You are one of those people too susceptible to hypnosis.
3. Don't punish yourself. Five minutes a day is far better than nothing. 10 minutes is better than five minutes, etc....
>2. Realize that total abstinence is the solution. If you had the willpower to restrict yourself to 30min a day, you wouldn't be here. You are one of those people too susceptible to hypnosis.
Unfortunately, people who have actually figured out how to do this are not here on the internet to tell you how.
Hypnosis is a lovely metaphor to describe the not-quite-mindful state that I often browse HN in. I’ve been trying to think of a good way to frame that for a while - thanks!
Whatever the intent of Goodreads initially, once Amazon bought it, it became a subtle funnel to drive sales of books, ideally through Amazon. While there are options there for libraries and many other booksellers, no one should believe for a minute that Bezos is interested in helping Goodreads be a contemplative site that fosters multiple readings of a small number of deeper reads.
The reviews can be helpful, but “tracking” ones books (or simple exercise, etc) is just a Silicon Valley middleman insertion into our otherwise simple lives so they can profit... somehow.
Many people at struggle to read books, probably because of smartphones and “internet reading”, but the reality is that this article is spot-on about our modern curse of information overload which gets combined with anxiety. We evolved the internet from our prior librarian mentality.
And while it’s perfectly fine to have libraries, book stores, catalogues of information, and encyclopedias, this article is correct that our personal lives could be improved by removing our click-happy ways from not only our web surfing habits, but from some of our book reading habits.
Personally, being an avid reader, I found it a relief to delete my Goodreads account some time ago. I also got rid of a number of books on hand, dwindling down to only 12, not counting some reference books.
I initially exported my “to read” Goodreads shelf into a spreadsheet, but eventually deleted it (and the 300+ books I had on the list). Not because it was unlikely I would ever read through them all, but because I also had come to some similar conclusions as the author of this article.
> Whatever the intent of Goodreads initially, once Amazon bought it, it became a subtle funnel to drive sales of books, ideally through Amazon.
Goodreads was originally a "subtle funnel to drive sales of books", as any book listing there offered links to buy it through various online retailers, and Goodreads got a cut of those sales as the referrer. However, since most people were buying through Amazon (which had already succeeded in marginalizing its competition), Amazon was paying Goodreads a fortune each month in referral fees. In the end, Amazon felt it was cheaper just to buy Goodreads out entirely than maintain the status quo.
Develop an internal barometer for a good book, instead of an external one.
Simple - if you enjoyed it, if it made you think, gave a different perspective, if you found something profound, if you keep returning to it, if it is a topic you are interested in.
Of course to develop this, one needs to read significant amount of books - even bad ones (and drop them once you find they are not good enough). But once developed, you can largely detect within a few pages whether a book is worth reading. Also appreciating a book depends on you state/age/mental framework at the time.
You augment this with human curation from places/forums you appreciate. Also original sources of books/authors you like is a good way to go down the rabbithole.
Read what you enjoy, and then read what the author mentions enjoying reading. Read a P.G. Wodehouse book: my personal suggestion. Preferably one from the Jeeves series.
A good book is not worth the investment only if you don't like it. I would assert that there aren't many worthless books that you can really enjoy. Also don't be afraid to drop a book that you find boring even if everyone says it's a great book its a classic etc. A good book will feel like a drug, you won't be able to put it down. It's not an investment its something you do for escapism. If it doesn't feel this way, just don't read it.
> It would be nice if sites like Goodreads kept statistics on ratings for second/third/... reading
Goodreads already does. (A newish feature, which was kind of surprising when it appeared, because once Amazon bought Goodreads it has largely ceased to develop the site further or fix longstanding bugs. Goodreads is useful, but I strongly recommend that any GR user periodically use the Export function, because surely one day soon we’re going to wake up and the site won’t be there any more.)
I consume a lot of audiobooks - which are great because I only listen to them while doing something else (walking, driving, gardening, home repairs etc.)
Well, fewer than what? I'd wager the median person reads 0 (or perhaps 1) books per year, where a book means something with more than 100 pages and at least 90% of those pages filled with text and read means read at least 90% of the words printed. To most people reading is like exercising, dieting, studying etc. They want to want to do it but don't want to do it.
You must live in a bubble if you think normal people read too many books.
More people report reading a book than you'd think. But the median books read per year is still too low for this to be a problem the author thinks it is.
>To follow the depiction by Antonello da Messina, St Jerome appears to be the proud owner of about ten books in all!
It's a fictional depiction some thousand years after the life of St. Jerome. How is this supposed to be an argument?
From what we know St. Jerome spent much of his life traveling between ancient libraries, collecting, reading and comparing a large number of different gospels (both canonical and apocryphal). He also had access to texts which are now considered lost, like the Gospel of the Hebrews.
> Strikingly, the most intelligent and thoughtful intellectual of the early church seems to have read fewer things than an average modern eight year old. To follow the depiction by Antonello da Messina, St Jerome appears to be the proud owner of about ten books in all!
What is a painting from 1475 supposed to tell us about the reading habits of the real St. Jerome, patron saint of librarians?
The paper "A History of Early Christian Libraries from Jesus to Jerome" by Thomas M. Tanner looks like a good source of information on the subject, but sadly it's only available from JSTOR.
If the author had read a few more books, he would have known that while St. Jerome is held in high regard, the Augustine is usually held as the chief intellectual of the time within the Church, and Augustine read a lot. He was incredibly well versed, for example, in the works of Cicero and Plato. In a later phase of the Church, Aquinas was also well read in a variety of sources, including Aristotle (and perhaps even Muslim writings translated into Latin). And his teacher, Albert Magnus, shows that the pre-modern mind was very much interested in the natural world.
I would agree with the point that we should be selective about our reading, even as we read widely. Focusing on reading things that have stood the test of time could still keep us busy.
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Thanks for this. I've begun a collection of quotes on not reading, to balance out my much larger collection of books. A couple quotes:
"Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works....Everywhere means nowhere. " - Seneca
"How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press -- The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus, we may see terrorists described as heroes, or secret matters pertaining to one's nation's defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "Everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era. People also have the right not to know and it's a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls [stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.] A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harvard commencement address
I'm not sure the article's title quite reflects its point, which is that the amount one reads is not by itself a very useful measure of anything; better to focus on what you're reading, why you're reading, and how you're reading. A better title might be: "The amount you read doesn't matter... as much as other factors" ... or something.
Some random thoughts:
1) Indeed many nonfiction books are full of fluff and filler. While there's a completionist in me that wants to read every word and finish all books started, I'm now in the more useful habit of skimming and reading the few chapters that interest me. I've been intrigued to see services like Blinklist that summarize the main points, and sometimes I think even those have too much fluff. Sometimes I grab my notebook to take notes only to find there's not much to take note of. But I confess, perhaps up to 95% of the nonfiction I read is ends up being forgotten because it's just not all that useful to me (more useful is just knowing where I can find the info later if needed).
(Although there are quite a few books, like Taleb's books, that have changed the way I think about and see the world, but I don't remember the details and wouldn't be great at giving a worthy summary of them; I'd just recommend the book.)
2) This topic reminds me of Mortimer Adler's book "How to Read a Book"; although I don't remember all his specific syntax, it really encouraged me to be more self-conscious about my reasons for reading.
I'd definitely recommend How to Read a Book if you want to go into deeper reading. I haven't implemented it fully, though I'd really like to (need to buy a copy of How to Read a Book to be able to do that, so I can keep referencing it), but it's definitely made me do some short summaries of fluff books, which solidifies the concepts I needed to get out of them. It was useful for that, and I'd love to apply it in more depth.
My biggest problem with this thinking is that it seems to consider "books" a unit of measure rather than distinct objects. Surely there are those among us who use the amount of books we've read as a sort of decoration for our intellect, but that's not really the point of reading books.The point is to make the knowledge in the books a part of us so we can live a better life. For that end some books are clearly better than others.
However I agree with the idea that it's impossible, and I would argue undesirable, to keep up with the "parade of new titles" put out by publishers.
So if we can't keep up but reading is still worth it, then the question becomes "How do we decide what to read?".
For my part I've found that the more old books I read the more I realize that many modern books are ful of old ideas with a slight (sometimes very slight) twist. So now I'm working through classics and only reading things sparingly. The criteria I've picked up is:
1. The book must have been around for at least a few generations
2. The book must have had a significant impact on how the world, or a field, is viewed
3. The book must be highly regarded by those who study it, even if they disagree with it
4. The book must deal with topics that are relevant to today (love, leadership, etc.)
This naturally leads to many so-called "classics". In reading them I've found that I rarely feel my time has been wasted, I feel I have a broader perspective, and I feel I've been able to elevate a bit above the frothy front end of new pop psychology/business/hero worship titles.
The problem is, if a book fulfills all your 4 criteria it's extremely unlikely its "wisdom" hasn't become common knowledge. No surprise = no information.
A truly life changing book would need to have been ignored or misunderstood by the world at large. But most such books will obviously be junk so I'm not sure there's a simple way to discover the good ones.
Even if such wisdom had indeed become common knowledge (which I doubt, but don't have time to draft a proper response), just being exposed to a piece of information doesn't do much for the individual. As I said above the goal isn't to stack up books and be briefly exposed to many ideas, but rather to have some ideas become a part of you.
Or, put more pithily, it is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you'll be when you can't help it.
In the context of learning some valuable already revered wisdom I don't think you'll find much of it.
Now in a general sense there will be a lot of things you didn't expect in any book. So tons of information but not the kind you're looking for.
The most interesting thing people who read Marx bring up is how he's been mischaracterized or perhaps had some ideas misattributed to him. Which doesn't interest me all that much.
> ...answer to the question of why we read, there is only one response that will ever be encompassing and ambitious enough: we read in order to know everything
Anecdotally, there's a large amount of people who will read a book wholly for the purpose of being able to say they've read it. Whether it's a sense of elitism, vanity or bits of both -- it's strikingly obvious when you ask deeper questions about a book and they can only respond with basic one sentences you could infer from the synopsis.
I believe the above has been amplified due to the false dichotomy of information technology vs good ol' books.
> it's strikingly obvious when you ask deeper questions about a book and they can only respond with basic one sentences you could infer from the synopsis.
When I watch movies with some people they will be "I think I didn't see this one before". And then half way in, they are like "oh I remember this, I did watch it after all". Some people are just forgetful.
They might just not remember. I used to read the same book many times and still have fun, because when I fully immersed myself and enjoyed it, I often ended up not remember a lot. I still enjoyed the experience of reading.
Someone who photographed my work area might manage to get six books into the picture, one a coffee-table book brought out so that I could sign some papers on it out on the porch. I have more than six books, and coffee-table books do not make up a large fraction. St. Jerome presumably had more than ten books.
Knowing the Aeneid well may have been all that one needed to get out of Eton or Harrow in the 18th Century. But if you look at what the literate actually read, they read a good deal. The founders of the US read a fair bit of Roman, Greek, and English history.
I can heartily recommend skipping books from the "school of life" and any of their publications.
I was gifted one on relationships, which is a topic I read often. I can say it was unfocused, terrible advice that seems like the author's rants about their own frustration with modern love conventions. Reactionary and sneaky with appeals to religion sprinkled throughout. No useful information, plenty of hand-wringing about how things were in the old days.
The Internet has changed how I assimilate knowledge. It has wired my brain to pay attention to soundbites, rather than lofty tomes. This is why I am the proud owner of a large list of various short proverbs & idioms that I have gathered over the years via social media. I only collect the ones that help me in some way and discard anything that doesn't resonate with me. One example is this phrase by Lao Tzu
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step[0]
In every book, you can find little kernels of truth and can distill many larger points made in a book, down to helpful and short gems of wisdom. For me this is how I can take a shortcut and avoid reading ridiculous amounts of books!
Do you find that boiling everything down to a soundbite or small phrase helps you improve your critical thinking and logical reasoning skills? Or do you find it is valuable just for the dopamine hit and feel-goods of cementing your already established worldviews and perspectives?
The reason I read books is because the author's perspectives are, often, wildly different from mine. Because of this difference, it helps me understand other people, and understand my own actions.
I feel like taking everything down to one-liners and ignoring "anything that doesn't resonate" is just avoiding the real work of thinking about yourself and your place in society. For example - Lao Tzu's perspectives about technology and how to balance external desires with my own personal views on how to integrate technology into my life have been immensely helpful in raising a family - I'm not sure I would've gotten that with just soundbites.
> is just avoiding the real work of thinking about yourself and your place in society
Well sometimes idioms / proverbs can contradict each other. Take for example the Russian proverb
If you try chasing two rabbits, you will end up catching none
Does this mean I have to be singularly focused on one task all the time, and not multitask? Hardly.
There are other quotes which challenge that proverb and inspire us to be multitaskers and 'do all the things' at the same time.
As I stated: my brain can't cope with a lofty tome, and prefers soundbites. It's how I'm wired, and I leverage that. I also integrate these proverbs into family life and use them as a guide, no different than reading loads of books. But horses for courses; if reading loads of books suits you, then do it!
What a strange set of conclusions. The author also misses out on one important point: many of us read books for pleasure, NOT because we feel pressure to read from society. I have a large collection of physical books in my TBR pile, and not one cent of guilt about that (even their presence on my shelves makes me happy).
I thought this was going to be a typical HN "build things instead" thing, but I actually love their take. Looking at the world around us lately I've been realizing more and more that "it's all in Plato"; his Republic is a book I read once in high school, but it's high time to re-read it.
What are some books you find your self going back to repeatedly (or want to)? My list:
- Domain Driven Design
- Ray Bradbury's short stories and Farenheit 451
- George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier
There's been a few comments in the thread like this but I think this is a deeply unhealthy understanding of pleasure. Pleasure does not mean simple, or effortlessly or easy.
Genuine or deeper pleasure means acquiring understanding and develop better senses. Masturbation is pleasure, but it's no replacement for an intimate relationship.
Warming up a pizza is pleasurable, but you would lose out on a lot of experiences if you never developed any taste beyond that. Exercising is a drag, but once you actually learn what your body can do, it's much more genuinely rewarding than sitting on the sofa.
Reading critically, reading deeply, despite maybe being hard, is not the opposite of pleasurable once you develop the faculties for it. Which everyone can I believe.
Reading isn't about intelligence. It's about knowledge. Knowledge expands the mind but doesn't necessarily make you more intelligent. E.g. I can read as many theoretical maths books as needed but it'll always be over my head. But if I read a C++ book then I might get a job versus reading a Java book.
I find the first paragraph to be a strawman of reality. Most people these days dont read books and I cant really recall competitive approach to reading among my social circles. Maybe author lives in different bubble, I dont know.
Also, I read Homer’s Odyssey and while it was fun and interesting, I dont think I found that to be "perfect repository" of pretty much anything. It is story, made up story with surprisingly good characters, but I dont think it taught me everything I want to know.
Anyway, lately I enjoyed history and memoirs or biographies of lesser players. The primary thing they are giving me is awareness that real world history has great variety in and and real world people are not as simple as Odyssey make it to be. For example, the point of view of non warrior Jew dying or surviving WWII makes you look at warrior honor code much differently. And so does Hitlers biography and so does Rosa Park biography or so does description of expansion or details of how civil war came to be.
I am not saying that everyone must read the same books as me. But claim that few of them are all there is to know is just wrong. When you read just one resource, you know everything and everything looks uncomplicated and simple. When you start to draw on multiple resources, that is when things start to get interesting and complex. And that is also when things start to be easier to remember.
I can only assume it's implied that the type of books this is about are philosophical (in the most broad sense, including self improvement) books, and so it makes sense to talk about religious books as examples?
People read for a variety of reasons, from professional books to books purely for entertainment. It also has to be said that while in those "pre-modern" times books were the most common medium, today there are many different ways to consume knowledge: newspapers, journals, blog posts and websites, graphic novels as written material, and we also have radio, tv, film, podcasts and many other types of source which serve the same role as books once did.
I've seen a number of religious cults dressed up as bookshops in my life, and this, with all of its expensive "counselling", "therapy", and "classes", looks to me like another one.
Although the article is pretty pretentious, it does resonate with a though I've had for a long time and also commented about earlier (it's not an original thought at all):
Why is everything a contest these days?
Who cares that I read 40 books last year, you read 120 and my neighbour read 2? Does that make us better or worse people? You can do 1000's of things in life or you can do nothing. No one asked to be brought into this world. No one will stay on this world forever.
Just do whatever makes you go through your day in the most content way. Life is hard enough as it is.
Can't say I agree at all. The self-improvement crowd emphasize interest and small daily gains, not maximization of everything. Some people don't read to know everything, some read to know something. Which can be a lot.
I try to avoid buying anymore books. Time becomes such a precious thing in modern life.
I seek to make knowledge actionable, to practice just in time learning. That is, if I need some knowledge to move forward on a task, then and only then do I turn to a book.
Tl;dr: "Reading was held to be extremely important, but the number of new books one read was entirely by the by. This wasn’t principally an economic point. Books were very expensive of course, but this wasn’t really the issue. What mattered was to read a few books very well, not squander one’s attention promiscuously on a great number of volumes."
Reading deeply and critically is important; to do otherwise is to just let the words wash over you without leaving an impression.
Reading promiscuously was regarded as bad historically not because it squandered attention but because most books were considered full of lies and the majority of readers couldn't be trusted to separate the truth from falsehood.
On the other hand, if your dozen books are made up of Ayn Rand, Malcolm Gladwell, and Seth Godin, you may find that your worldview is as limited as any medieval scholastic.
The thing with reading is that the main point is often buried beneath realms of text. A movie can deliver the same concept in two hours when a book typically takes several days.
Another thing with reading is that there's no logical reason why the content you're reading is better than television. If TV can have crap so can books.
I have found that reading builds biases better than television. The reason is that reading takes much more effort than television and oftentimes the more effort you spend on something the more bias towards it you develop.
I've found that in general if you want to have a larger breadth of knowledge... youtube videos are actually awesome at distilling concepts and getting to the main point.
I'm saying this as someone who use to and still actively reads books.
All those "Oh, I have read sooooo many books this year!"-thing is just another elitist posture.
It's pretty much like the minimalists who run around and tell people that they only own a MBP and an iPhone XPro+ (or whatever the maxed out version is) and two potted plants. Most people will not have enough disposable income to buy a full-fletched MBP and that iPhone.
You need to be rich (kind of) to be able to have a minimalist lifestyle. The same goes with reading.
Most people will just try to make ends meet, juggle with bringing job, familiy, friends, sports/staying healthy under one hat and in the evening they don't want to process any more information from a book.
Their everyday life is SO packed with everything, there's no time to sit back, relax and read 25 books a year.
So, yeah, read two books a year and call it a day.
>You need to be rich (kind of) to be able to have a minimalist lifestyle. The same goes with reading.
This is the second time I've seen someone make this claim and the second time I'll refute it: Minimalism is not a rich-specific ideology. Being minimal as benefits if you're poor, including making it much easier to move. Moreover, you might be "minimalist" without choice, merely because you can't afford to buy things. You could be angry at your lack of material possessions or you could temporarily embrace the ideology to help you get to a position where you can start collecting items that make you happy.
Imagine you are poor and have a broken microwave, but you've been holding on to it. Why? Are you going to fix it? Likely not (at least not well, and its a dangerous thing to get wrong). Just throw it out or sell it for parts. Just because you are poor does not mean you should hold on to things that merely take up space.
When you're poor you have to hold on to things that you might need, or that sort-of work. You keep your old phone with a broken screen because your current one might get stolen (or you might have to sell it). You keep a broken microwave because you can use it in a pinch (maybe it works if you hold the door shut, or if you angle the cord just so), or you might scavenge some parts from it, or you might have have to fix it as best you can even though that's dangerous. You can't afford the transaction costs of just selling everything.
I think you're ignoring the complex dynamics that cause and compound poverty and to which a minimalist lifestyle is anything but an answer.
Consider low education levels, unemployment, physical and mental health disabilities, having to to take care of live-in dependent family members, being a divorced parent with children straining your financial capabilities and so on and so on.
A minimalist lifestyle is a conscious choice one makes, pursuing the idea that living with less "stuff" will help attain happiness. It is assumed that other important basic conditions - health, financial situation, education, access to employment,... - are already fulfilled as well in order to create the freedom to attain that goal.
Minimalism as a golden hammer to dig yourself out of poverty is a proposition that doesn't even remotely begin to address the underlying causes of poverty.
That broken microwave, for instance, might just work well enough to heat up frozen meals. If your household budget mostly goes to e.g. medical bills, rent, paying off student debt, childcare,... you'll hold on to that microwave for dear life.
The kind of elite that likes and actually reads books is still a better kind.
Also the existence of lots of poor people struggling does not mean you should live like them and imitate them. Some Christian sects and other historic cults do have this poverty worship in them, but it's fringe.
You talking about your latest programming project is just elitist posturing that you have a computer and stable electricity, which are not available to many around the globe. Therefore you should feel bad and get rid of your computer, sell your belongings an live in rags on the streets.
Well, some people would like to sell us on the point that you can only form your character, be a good leader, a successful person, if you read $amount books, or at least "the right ones". Not everybody got the money or the time to do that.
And it's not about poor people or imitating their lifestyle, to suffer willingly or whatnot, but it's the "I'm better than you, because I read lot of books"-expression that more and more people communicate.
And in that case they are pretty similar to the over the top minimalists: "If you own more things than me, you are not enlightened enough." The same goes for some readers "If you haven't read this and that... better stop talking to me."
Maybe it's just my LinkedIn filter bubble, but the German tech/entrepreneur scene is filled with that. Everybody's writing a book and if you haven't read it, you're out of the game.
There are communities and subcultures for everything. I guess there are circles where having traveled to n countries is the brownie points or knowing the lyrics to all the XYZ artist's songs or knowing all about anime or whatever.
People come up with all kinds of subcultures. Obsessing over business/self help/entrepreneur books is just one such subculture. I guess they are not bragging about reading Anna Karenina but the latest best selling get-rich-by-this-mental-trick book endorsed by Elon Musk.
The solution is not to read linkedin.
Telling people to read fewer books is too general of an advice. Books span a huge range of different topics. Reading Kim Kardashian biography is not the same as reading a book on game theory or medieval history or a classic novel or a good sci-fi or an exciting psychothriller or whatever.
The same way, someone could saw "Do less sports!" because there are bodybuilding addicts and crossfit evangelists on Instagram who think you're subhuman if you don't work out 4 hours every day. Sure, there is such a subculture, but the general population does way too little sports. Similarly with reading.
I hope nobody buys that. Sylt should go down, nothing more to say on that.
Being a minimalist is an expensive lifestyle, you'll need to have some money to make the switch to that. Also, you'll need to buy the best of the class as those are often the devices which fulfill most tasks at once, so you can be a real minimalist.
I agree that minimalism is frequently relatively expensive.
It's just that, well, the people who buy apartments on Sylt[1] probably think they're not elite, because they think the people who buy villas on Malle are the elite. Eyeballing the graph on p.22 of https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/796280/5eaebf3d73e4f... it appears that the scenario we're considering for elitism above is affordable by at least 60% of german households.
[1] listings sorted by ascending price, so those first condos are well below the 2017 cutoff for "wealthiest 10%."
I think that as long as there are people "above you", be it in net wealth, income, cost for their houses or what, you'll always be tempted to think you are "normal" or rather on the low-end.
At least I notice that I sometimes think that way when I wonder why people do not buy something they like or sth. like that.
Perhaps the small libraries of historic figures has more to do with the availability of books than it does their minimalism. I agree that people should not be reading every new self-help or business book that gets published. The majority of new books are bad. History acts as a great filter, which is why focussing on old books is a strong heuristic to find good books. I also agree with Nassim Taleb, who says that you should try to read the works from people who have actually done something (opposed to modern pseudo-philosophers like Alain de Botton, who is just trying to capitalise on the religion-shaped hole in western morality). I am not a religion apologist, but his videos and lectures are structured exactly the same way as sermons. He even feigns a false pastor modesty. Ugh I am beginning to rant now.
As a civilisation I still believe that we are not reading enough. I can feel my reading habit eroded and tugged by modern media. I feel fulfilled after reading in a way that YouTube or Netflix cannot provide.